Julia (24 page)

She had awoken with this laughter still reverberating above her, joining the other noises of the house. The towel had been dragged off her arm, and the left side of the bed was stained by irregular red blots. For a moment she sensed that, as in her dream, Olivia Rudge hung nearby, just out of sight, waiting to appear. It would not be long. Mrs. Fludd’s final words had then come back to her. Struggling to impose firmness and direction on her dream-tattered mind, Julia had wrapped her wrist in the top sheet and groggily sat up. She looked out the window across the room and saw rain drizzling down from a ghost-gray sky. A scarf of cool wind reached her from the open window and instantly vaporized in the heat. For the first time, Julia was consciously aware of the hot, feral smell pervading the bedroom, the reek of a lion’s cage.

Throwing aside the ruined sheet, Julia had risen and
looked at her watch: now it was eight, and she had slept through the entire day.
Your friends
. Mark, her truest friend, was in danger. Her mouth filled with dust. When she had glanced into the closet and seen again the ripped, scattered dolls, she staggered away from the bed and felt blood begin to move sluggishly down her wrist. She tore several sheets of Kleenex from the box near her bed and clamped them over the slash, which had begun to pulse and complain. When she struggled into her robe, she buttoned the left sleeve to fasten the Kleenex to the wound and went down the echoing stairs to telephone Mark.

Olivia was abroad; Olivia would have anyone she wanted.
It can’t be got rid of. It wants revenge
, Heather Rudge had said.
It wants revenge
.

Mark’s telephone had shrilled a dozen times. She would have to go to his room.

So now she walked blearily along Kensington High Street, the wad of sodden Kleenex dropped somewhere behind her and blood seeping into the cuff of her shirt. Between the flat gray sky and the rain-blackened streets, the streetlamps had already switched on, and cast an acid yellow light over the crowds through which she pushed. From time to time, a wave of oblivious men carried her back a few paces, making her stagger as she was thrown, almost unseen, from one comfortless shoulder to the next. She looked in all their faces for Mark, and found instead—it seemed to her—only sneers and laughter. Julia realized that the men thought she was drunk. Sleeping pills had never affected her so strongly before. Maybe it was due to lack of food. But the image of food—a greasy pile of pinkish-gray meat—made her stomach lurch and tighten.

A heavy curtain of dark appeared before her vision, blotting
out the bunched, jostling crowds and the snarling jungle of traffic beyond them. Julia tottered, blind, and fell sideways against the rough facing of a building. For a moment, as the people sweeping past brushed her elbows and knees and trod on her feet, she lost all awareness of her identity and surroundings. The wave of nausea and dizziness was nearly a relief, sucking responsibility from her, and she gave herself over to it, forgetting why she was out on the street and where she was going. Her mind fled back to the image of the drained Mrs. Fludd, seated on a rickety chair alone on a rooftop.
Your friends
. Then the long, long flight down a narrowing tunnel. Kate had been her nearest friend. Her thought bucked like a rearing horse.

She opened her eyes to a dark burned with acid yellow. I’m in her world now, she thought. Soon I will meet her again. I nearly know it all. The two imprisoned women, the two ruined men had nearly brought her to the full knowledge she sought, and she had to make her way through Olivia Rudge’s world to find the rest. Men like beasts rutted past her, each eyeing the stricken woman leaning against the brick wall of a bank. A high thin red line—a scream—traced the sky.

Men followed her with their eyes. Before her, as she watched them quicken with lust or amusement (
What in the world can I look like?
she wondered), they drew their faces into the masks of beasts, boars, bulls, wild dogs. Bristles jutted from their snouts, their feet were hooves tearing the ground. Their skin burned in the yellow light, unhealthy and sallow. In the babble of voices, she thought she discerned Magnus’s low growl, and started, her mind a fluttering rag.

Her hands brushed her thighs: cotton. She was wearing cotton trousers. She could not remember dressing. Looking down, she saw that she wore a pale shirt, a short tan
jacket. She touched her hair and felt oil. The voice was not Magnus’s, merely that of a man shouting to another man in the street.

Four young men passed before her, their hair languorously curled; as they turned to stare, she saw their faces inflamed with pustules, death in the pouches of their cheeks, their eyes like razors cutting pieces from her body. In the high, curved, bald forehead of a man thrusting past she saw death, the skin tightening on his skull; and she saw in a woman’s colorless lips death, as they parted over her teeth. And she saw they were all dead, sweeping past her in the noise of raised voices and automobiles. The dark gained on them all.

Bone-shining foreheads, skeletal umbrellas against the dark, now nearly invisible sky and the wash of yellow from the lamps and headlights. It was the world of her dream life.

Julia fought to right herself steadily on her feet. Simple movement would cure this dreadful trick of vision. The boys, now further down the block, were only boys; the men and women merely weary from work and the journey home. She felt a familiar pang—an echo from her old personality—as she realized that the little tan jacket would probably cost two weeks’ wages for any of the men crowding past. Magnus had persuaded her to buy it: or had he bought it, using her money? After so many years, it made little difference, but she wanted him to have bought it. Possessions were shameful. Then why had she bought the house?

She had been chosen. In that was the last mystery.

One step, another; she tugged at the hem of the jacket and straightened her back. No one was looking at her, in all the sweeping flood passing by. Julia began to walk more steadily, and recognized she had come over half the way to Kensington Church Street. It was one way of getting to Notting Hill,
though roundabout. She hung unmoving on the crowded pavement for a second, debating whether to go back and take the walk along the side of the park which went directly north and ended at Holland Park Avenue, but then decided, in the cool gauzy air, to continue on the long way. The unaccustomed coolness would clear her head. She moved on again, passing W. H. Smith’s, a package store, a clothing shop where mannequins flung out their arms as if wailing.

Then she caught sight of herself in a shop window and hurried past, unable to look away. Her face was a formless white puddle, with discolored blots beneath her eyes—it was the face of one of the women in the Breadlands Clinic, the face of a dazed animal fleeing experience. For a moment she saw how she would look when old, and she turned wildly away and rushed down the street, her bag bumping at her side.

A known face at a queue at a bus stop across the street from Biba’s made her shorten her stride. The old woman in the long black dress hadn’t yet seen her; Julia turned her back to the line of people at the edge of the pavement, feeling an instinctive desire to escape.… Still, she might have been mistaken. She edged sideways and back, and dared to turn around. The long narrow face now in profile, the dogmatic chin, tendrils of white hair escaping from beneath a black hat: it was Miss Pinner.

Her first response had been panic: perhaps she did not want to know what the old woman had seen in the mirror that disastrous night. Perhaps she already did know.

But her curiosity about that evening was too great to be dismissed; she could not flee from Miss Pinner too. Julia’s decision seemed to help her dispel Olivia’s world, for the tired people at the bus stop all appeared reassuringly ordinary, and
she waited until two or three men had walked between them and then crossed the blackly shining pavement to tap the old woman on the shoulder. She pronounced her name, and heard her voice emerging levelly, distinctly.

“Yes? Yes?” The old woman started out of her reverie and turned her headmistress’s blue eyes on Julia.

She doesn’t recognize me, Julia thought. “Excuse me,” she began, and saw the old woman purse her mouth expectantly, as if she were about to be asked for directions. “I’m surprised to see you here, Miss Pinner,” she said.

Fear jumped for a second in the woman’s eyes, and she stepped out of the queue. “Mrs. Lofting?” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you at first, you see … you look ill, my dear. Yes, you are quite right, I am not here often … and I am afraid that I shall have to be getting off home.” She lifted a small brown parcel. “We used to enjoy shopping here, and since Miss Tooth’s birthday is approaching soon, I wanted to see if I could find anything for her at Derry and Toms—but I found that they had been replaced by that very curious store across the street, and the little restaurant on the roof was shut, so I bought her something elsewhere.” As she chattered, she glanced down the street obviously looking for her bus. “I’m late already. I must be home in time to prepare our dinner. Heavens, it’s past eight.”

“Do you have time to talk to me before your bus comes, Miss Pinner?”

“I can’t say, I’m sure.” Then the little flicker of fear was replaced by something like cunning. “I’m sorry that I was taken ill at your charming house, Mrs. Lofting. It was a very distressing evening for all of us, I’m sure … and then poor Mrs. Fludd’s sudden demise … her niece forbade any of us to attend the funeral … but I was remiss in not writing to
thank you for your hospitality. Miss Tooth and I were entertained in many grand houses years ago, when Miss Tooth could still follow her career, as you know, and we never sinned against hospitality in that way. I do hope you can forgive me.”

“You were taken ill?” said Julia, focusing on the one sentence she had been able to follow.

“A spell of faintness,” said Miss Pinner, showing the faint but detectable embarrassment honest people bring to their untruths. “I’ve been kept very busy these past months, going through all our old scrapbooks.” She hitched up her shoulders painfully, in the movement of one adjusting to the twinges of a long-standing arthritis. “I can’t do it in the mornings anymore, so my afternoons are very tiring. But Miss Tooth”—here the dogmatic face forgot all embarrassment—“Miss Tooth can still do her exercises.”

“Can she?” said Julia, wondering if the drug were still clouding her perceptions.

“She can still work at the barre,” said Miss Pinner with great satisfaction. “Miss Tooth is very supple yet.”

“At the bar?” said Julia, trying to visualize little Miss Tooth serving up pints of bitter in a public house.

“Oh, yes. Of course she hasn’t the stamina she had when she was younger, but she has all of her grace. We are preparing a book from the scrapbooks. Many people still remember her, as I see you do yourself. Of course, you would only have heard of her. You’re too young to have seen her dance.”

“Unfortunately, I was too young, yes,” said Julia, seeing it at last. She remembered how, during the séance, Miss Tooth had seemingly floated to the floor in one effortless motion. “But she was very famous, wasn’t she?” Julia guessed.

“How kind of you to remember,” said Miss Pinner, and
now her manner was entirely friendly. “Rosamund was a great artist. I was her dresser for twenty-five years and we retired together. After working for Rosamund Tooth it was impossible to work for anyone else. And I wouldn’t touch any of the young lot. All technique and no poetry.”

“Did Miss Tooth see anything in the mirror after you’d fainted that night?” Julia said brutally.

Miss Pinner’s face trembled into an utter blankness of expression.

“I thought I saw something when I followed her in,” Julia added. “And I know what it was.”

Miss Pinner looked aghast, and Julia felt a twisting of guilt for making the old woman confront her lie. “Perhaps you saw it too.”

“No—no—Mrs. Lofting, you should not be asking me about that night. I was tired from the long ride down from our home and from putting the scrapbooks in order. I don’t know what I saw.” She stepped nervously back into her place in the queue, and Julia followed her.

“Was it a little girl? A blond child? She is, she was, a wicked person, Miss Pinner. Please tell me, Miss Pinner.” But she was already confused by the expression of mixed astonishment and relief on Miss Pinner’s angular face. “Wasn’t it the blond girl?”

“I am afraid to tell you, Mrs. Lofting,” said Miss Pinner. “Oh. There’s my bus down the road. Please don’t detain me. It’ll soon be here.”

Julia, afraid that she would never know, gently touched the thick black stuff of Miss Pinner’s coat with her right hand. “Wasn’t it the little girl? She does horrible things. She once made me faint too.”

Miss Pinner shook her head. “I don’t think …” she
began. Down the block, the bus swerved into traffic and came toward them, its headlamps beaming yellow through gathering dark.

Julia suddenly felt a sick certainty that her assumptions had been wrong; she was again at the edge of the abyss, afraid to look down. The bus swung heavily toward the curb, a wing of yellow light flashing below the upper deck. In his cage behind rain-streaked glass the driver looked totemic.

“I must get on now or wait another twenty minutes,” said Miss Pinner. The queue moved forward slowly, a crippled insect laden with parcels and umbrellas. “I would not have said so much except that you knew about Rosamund.” She was nearly at the steps of the bus, kept from them by only a fat woman struggling with two small dogs and a little girl with the face of a pampered pig.

“I have to know,” said Julia as the woman swung the pig-child up onto the steps and gruntingly lifted herself and the dogs into the bus. “I have to know.” She raised her hands, as if praying.

Miss Pinner looked in shock at Julia’s left hand and shirt cuff, and then gazed straight into her face with a tense compassion. “I saw you,” she blurted, and the conductor raised her up onto the platform and the bus was gone.

Earlier that day, brother and sister were sitting across from each other at Lily’s table, two empty wine bottles and soup bowls and plates littered with bones between them. Magnus sat slumped in his chair, staring at the unappetizing remains of his lunch. He looked flushed and puffy, but he had changed into a clean suit and shirt, and wore immaculately polished shoes. He was impressive. Locked into his face, at a complicated
level beneath the features but informing them, was a combination of authority and power and malice which she had seen in him all her life.